John Carmack: Don't Be the Out-of-Touch Kung Fu Master
Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master – John Carmack
John Carmack reflects on Musashi's Book of Five Rings and draws a parallel between the evolution of martial arts from battlefield necessity to sport and hobby, and the fate of programming skills. Hand-assembling opcodes and writing code by hand are becoming relics as AI makes many skills less critical. He warns against clinging to tradition like an out-of-touch Kung Fu master, while celebrating retro computing for love of the craft.
But don’t be the out of touch Kung Fu master, heir to lifetimes of tradition, that gets mauled by an amateur MMA fighter.
- PostOnce
John Carmack is a personal hero of mine, so it pains me to say this:
Carmack hasn't produced anything noteworthy since AI was invented, therefore, how productive can it really be?
It could be he is doing incredible work in private... but it could also be that he's lost in the weeds, because AI is so counterproductive while feeling the opposite?
I remain a skeptic.
- glimshe
We are going from the era of manual, line-by-line mental model transcription to one where software engineers can focus on data structures, software architecture and algorithms.
I love being able to quickly bring out the program that is already running in my head without having to worry about the grind of typing it into a format that the compiler understands. Dealing with API names. Syntax. Language quirks. Library gotchas. A sizeable portion of my successful career as a software engineer was spent on the tiresome process of interacting with a text editor/IDE to get a program to do what I wanted.
I was there when people were still coding assembly. A slow torture where the simplest things took forever to get right.
Once I've mentally solved the problem, the fun is mostly over for me. Pure vibe coding is dull and unsustainable with current technology for all but the simplest systems; AI-assisted coding, on the other hand, rekindled my passion for computers.
- tkel
Ironically, this post comes off as out of touch. The purpose of the various martial arts isn't just to win in a life-or-death brawl or murder people as efficiently as possible. Similarly, the point of programming isn't just to generate as much code as possible, or only to be more "productive".
- sriram_malhar
Everyone who writes enthusiastically about AI already has the benefit of having worked without AI. They have been schooled in the basics. Enough of us know about data structures, concurrency, networks, language design etc. from the ground up that the knowledge is passed on. I worry about the world that we will be living in when a whole generation has skipped learning the basics the hard way. Given the attendance rates at various educational institutions, I fear that day is already here.
- nickledave
> In 2022, he left Oculus to work on his AGI startup, Keen Technologies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack
oh
- maplethorpe
> But don’t be the out of touch Kung Fu master, heir to lifetimes of tradition, that gets mauled by an amateur MMA fighter.
I have an issue with this analogy, since a professional MMA fighter is a highly skilled individual who has honed their body through years of training.
A more apt analogy might be "don't be the kung fu master who believes they can survive an atomic bomb, dropped from far above by a pilot who does not understand how it works, but who has nevertheless been gifted the ability to deploy it."
- xyzsparetimexyz
'Make sure you don't fall behind!!!' is my least favourite type of post about ai. There's resllt nothing to learn about ai. You're just typing and telling it what to do.
- DavCreator
https://xxcancel.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/209844326221423009...